Federal CTO Perspectives

I’m
a contributing member of the U.S. Federal Big Data Commission sponsored facilitated
by Tech America Foundation. Steve Mills, Senior VP and Group Executive Software
& Systems, is one of the primary Commissioners. The purpose of the
commission is to provide federal government agencies guidance on approaches for
reaping the benefits from the explosion of information that’s resulted from
conducting business on the internet and the rise of social media. Much of the
discussion within the commission has centered around the value derived by implementing
a big data strategy and why is it somehow different than past approaches for
managing data. But that’s exactly the point – Big Data is not about managing
the data or information so much as it is about how to make all this information
useful and ultimately actionable. In other words, what insight can be gleaned from
massive amounts information that could not already be derived by using existing
systems or methods. Another element of the Big Data paradigm is the need to
derive insight from information that may have a short shelf-life and changes in
real-time. Information of this type often comes from automated systems that
generate data continuously according to the dynamics of the system – this is
often referred to as the velocity of data. Of course it’s necessary to establish
the infrastructure needed to ingest such large data sets and store the
information once it’s obtained. But the fact of the matter is that building out
the infrastructure to manage massive amounts of storage or processing real time
data is not the end game. The real purpose and value behind the Big Data play
is making all this information actionable by gaining deeper insight into what
are often the hidden patterns of our business or social interactions. So from my perspective, establishing the
infrastructure to manage all this information may be necessary but it’s not
where the real value is derived. The
more impactful and challenging aspect of Big Data is extracting the value of
that information through the application of data science and the analytical tools
that uncover normally hidden patterns that offer new business options and drive
better decision support. At the end of the day it’s all about gaining deep
insight through the application of analytics and how we apply this new
understanding to automate our business decisions.